A journal about WordPress, the web and design.

WordPress

Last week I was at Smashing Conference in Oxford manning the WordPress.com stand with a few fellow Automatticians. I was asked a couple of times about why WordPress doesn’t automatically minify and concatenate scripts and stylesheets – the array of scripts and stylesheets that WordPress loads can be severely inflated by various plugins and themes and the hit to performance is not insignificant.

I can think of quite a few reasons why this isn’t handled automatically, but it did get me thinking that it wouldn’t be too difficult to build a plugin that does just that.

There are many different ways of customising the WordPress login page and process. However, many of these methods are over-engineered or are so stylised or complicated that they are difficult to shoehorn into the project that you might be working on.

I’m writing this post in an effort to be super-simple, and provide the most basic of tools needed to create a custom WordPress login page and sign up page.

Once you’ve created the template, create a new page that uses the “Login” template and for the purposes of this tutorial, name it “Login”. You can call it whatever your like, but note that this tutorial has hard-coded references to the page’s URL being: yourwebsite.com/login/

So you need to make sure that your page’s permalink matches this, or change the URLs in the code to match whatever URL your new “Login” page has.

Step 2 – Done – if you visit your new login page, it should successfully log you in. Now, let’s tidy things up a bit.

Then, in WordPress, you create your page called “Register” and you choose this template for it. And once again, we add some redirects to our functions.php file to completely hide the standard WordPress register page:

Again, our register script is assuming that the register page is found at: yourwebsite.com/register/

You now have login and sign up pages ready to be customised in whichever way you want.

Step 4 – Take a step back, and observe the wonder that you have created

No more bogstandard WordPress login and register pages for your website. This implementation can be further developed with custom logout links and a proper method for dealing with forgotten passwords. I’ll get some guidance on how you do that up on here soon.